Peak Living

24/12/2025

Healthy Food Is More Than Carbs and Fats: How Food Additives Affect Gut Health:-

The most important part of packaged food isn’t the nutrition label; it’s the ingredient list. When we think about eating healthy, we usually focus on cutting sugar, carbs, or fats. But there is another part of the picture that often gets ignored- synthetic chemicals added to packaged foods.

Many everyday foods like chips, namkeens, instant noodles, biscuits, cakes, frozen meals, and soft drinks contain artificial flavours, mineral-based food colours, and anti-caking agents. These substances help food look better, taste stronger, and stay shelf-stable, but their long-term effects on the body are not fully understood.

Some of these additives are made of extremely tiny particles, called nanoparticles, which are smaller than 100 nanometres. At this size, materials behave very differently from normal powders. Many of these additives were approved decades ago, based on short-term animal tests that never looked at how such tiny particles affect the gut lining, the immune system, gut bacteria, long-term, daily exposure starting from childhood. In other words, they were approved before modern science even understood how important gut health really is.

Because of their tiny size, these particles may Enter the cells lining the intestine, get trapped in gut immune tissue, cross a damaged or stressed gut barrier. Instead of causing immediate harm, they trigger slow, ongoing inflammation. Over time, this inflammation damages intestinal cells and weaken the gut barrier.

Why this matters for whole-body health: The gut is not just about digestion. It plays a key role in immunity, metabolism, and even brain function. Long-term gut inflammation has been linked to many of the modern health issues our society is facing like imbalance of gut bacteria, inflammatory bowel diseases, “leaky gut”, autoimmune conditions, depression and other mental health problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancers.

Additives commonly involved: Some commonly used additives with known or suspected gut effects include silicon dioxide (E551)- anti-caking agent, titanium dioxide (E171) -used to make foods look white, iron oxides (E172) - colouring agents, aluminium silicates (E554–E555)- anti-caking agents, artificial flavour delivery substances.
Healthy eating isn’t just about nutrients. It’s also about reducing daily exposure to poorly understood additives that interact with the gut and immune system. Choosing fresh, minimally processed foods isn’t a trend or fear, it’s a practical way to protect gut health in a food system that often tests convenience more thoroughly than biology.

04/12/2025

Anti-caking agent in famous instant noodles and other processed food. E551 can lead to inflammation in the wall of the intestine leading to many different kinds of health problems on long term use. Most chronic health issues happen because of unchecked long term inflammation.

27/11/2025

This is the front page of Times of India today, promoting widespread general use of oxymetazoline - a decongestant nasal medication that works by narrowing blood vessels inside the nose.
1) Using this spray for more than a week causes "rebound congestion" which is a dependency on the drug. Relieving this dependency may need nasal steroid medication.
2) Oxymetazoline has drug interactions with MAO inhibitors. It is also given with caution in people who are hypertensives, heart disease or glaucoma.

This is an open advertisement for a drug without any clearly visible warnings or drug instructions. Is this ethical or socially responsible?

27/11/2025

Breathing - A choking hazard in Delhi.

25/11/2025

Less Alcohol = Better Blood Pressure Control.

25/11/2025

Use this prompt -->
"Deep Safety Check With Warnings and Alternatives"

1) Take pic or screenshot of ingredient list of whatever product you want to check.
2) Upload it to ChatGPT.
3) Type the above prompt.

Get more control over your safety and health

18/11/2025

We have confused stimulation with entertainment. Our minds are overloaded... while our bodies are forgotten. This is your reminder to touch the real world again. Entertainment should calm you, not exhaust you.
✨ Cook. Walk. Paint. Garden. Stitch. Breath. Consciously.
✨ Come back to your body.

12/11/2025

Interoceptive awareness strengthens the neural connections between the insular cortex and limbic system, in the brain. This leads to better emotional regulation and consequently better autonomic regulation. Over time, stress response decreases, lowering cortisol levels and chronic inflammation in the body. This brings better mental and physical health.

08/11/2025

We Are Not Doing Entertainment Right

Online media has turned our world into a predominantly mental world. There was a time when our routine entertainment was grounded in physical reality of the body like sitting together and talking to people in real life, walking with people, embroidering, gardening, listening to music, etc. Being children before the internet was a thing, for us entertainment meant sitting outside on the ground and playing with sand and mud, climbing on trees, playing with flower bushes, and talking to each other. Most things which keep us aware of the physical body are in today’s time missing, most of the time.

Being aware of the physical body strengthens the interoceptive sense which connects the brain and the body and makes us better at regulating our emotions, and brings more parasympathetic dominance or a state of relaxation by slowing down mental processes. This is the state of an “Earth” mind-body-personality.

Excessive mental indulgence brings a state of sympathetic activation or “Wind” mind-body-personality elements. It happens when we watch reels, continuously scroll through social media for more information like never-ending irrelevant news, messages, videos, tv shows. Our brain is continuously stimulated. Thousands of thoughts rushing through it stimulate the body’s sympathetic system or the stress response, thus turning our body-mind into a confused imbalanced pool of stress and hyperexcitability.

To slow down and ground ourself means working according to how nature intended our body-mind to work and not just how technology-driven society wants it to work. Replacing mind-based entertainment, at least to some extent, with body-based recreational activities like origami, other crafts, writing, singing, walking, embroidery, sewing, painting, cooking, gardening, listening to music, etc is a good way to increase mental stability.

05/11/2025

Alcohol and High Blood Pressure: Lifestyle Intervention for Hypertension

Drinking alcohol for a long time can seriously harm the body. It can damage brain cells, raise blood pressure, increase blood sugar, weaken immunity, raise cancer risk, and lead to addiction.
When we look specifically at high blood pressure (hypertension), alcohol can raise blood pressure not only with long-term use but even after short-term or occasional drinking.

For the brain, alcohol acts like a stress signal. It makes the body release more of the stress hormone cortisol. With long-term use, it also disturbs the system that normally controls how much cortisol is released.

In the blood vessels, alcohol allows more calcium to enter the muscle layer of the vessel wall. This makes the vessels tighten and narrow. Just like squeezing a water pipe raises pressure inside it, narrowing of blood vessels raises blood pressure.

With chronic drinking, alcohol keeps stimulating a kidney hormone called renin, which further increases blood pressure over time.

The inner lining of blood vessels (called endothelial cells) is also damaged by alcohol. This damage causes oxidative stress and makes the vessels lose their natural flexibility, so they tend to stay more constricted.

Alcohol also keeps the “fight or flight” (sympathetic) system of the body overactive. This not only raises blood pressure but also increases long-term inflammation, adding to heart and health problems.

So, people who have high blood pressure should avoid alcohol as much as possible. If stopping all at once feels hard, reducing intake gradually helps. Continuous drinking keeps the body in a stressed state, making it difficult for even relaxing yogic practices like yogic deep abdominal breathing or certain meditation practices to lower blood pressure effectively.

03/11/2025

02/11/2025

How to control high blood sugar through lifestyle.